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But I will say the first half of the book is the better half. The first sees Cicero take on a corrupt governor of Sicily as he builds a case against the man and the reader is introduced to the brutality of Roman law and punishment ("miles and miles of crucifixions") and the showdown in the courtroom. Despite being set in antiquity it reads like a contemporary legal thriller such as you might expect from John Grisham, and the book really takes off. When I was in university, I had the immense privilege and joy of taking a course in classical rhetoric. Rhetoric itself is fascinating; classical rhetoric I found doubly so. There is something very rewarding about breaking down even the most modern of eloquent orations and finding, in their bones, the lessons learned and promulgated by voices from two millennia ago. I suspect that, in addition to my general interest in fiction set in ancient Rome, is what first landed Imperium on my to-read list. When I finally got around to it, I was sceptical. As I started reading it, I wasn’t sure this type of narration was what I wanted right now. I pushed on, though, and I’m glad I did. Robert Harris tells a compelling story not just about Cicero but about the last days of the Roman Republic. However, despite that, I found the book actually very good. After a brief introduction of Tiro and a skimming of Cicero's beginnings and his marriage to Torrentia, it launches into the Gaius Verres case, which I found both highly educational and highly entertaining. I like a good courtroom drama, and here, Harris manages to create one despite the differences between ancient Roman and modern legal systems. On top of that, he is laying down the seeds of political corruption with everyone from Pompey to Crassus to a young Caesar and showing the age old animosity between the aristocrats and the plebs. Another surprise was the villainous portrayal of Catalina as a violent, brute of a man who had openly murdered people who stood in his way. I had kind of come to admire Catalina as the misunderstood sometimes-rascal presented in Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mystery, "Catalina's Riddle". Now I'm going to have to do more research of original sources to come to my own conclusion about this historical enigma. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7951720M Openlibrary_edition
Set in the dying days of the Roman Republic, Marcus Cicero begins his ascent through the ranks of the senate to become one of the most powerful men in Rome. But the path to becoming the famous orator we now know is strewn with dangerous men who would see a high-minded lawyer dead in a ditch to get what they want. Men like Pompey and Julius Caesar who are looking to destroy democracy for a military dictatorship and absolute power. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-09-07 13:04:05 Boxid IA1925702 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier This is not a book for those who like flesh-slashing, cut-them-up action stories. Rather, it’s an intricate legal novel of startling historical veracity (as far as I can research) that really held my interest. There are some wonderful turns of phrase. While making a comment about hagiography, Tiro says simply it is the “distorting light of the future on the shadows of the past.” Rich material for any writer - but there is a further reason, I suspect, why Harris has chosen the mid-1st century BC as his setting. It is, by a wide margin, the best documented period in ancient history, with what is, for the classicist, a whole wealth of evidence: orations, memoirs, even personal correspondence. Harris, like an excavator restoring a shattered mosaic, uses material native to the Romans whenever he can, fitting the fragments of real speeches and letters into the patterns of his own reconstruction. The result is an experiment as bold as it is unexpected: a novel that draws so scrupulously on the Roman source material that it forgoes much of what are traditionally regarded as the prime features of the thriller. Although there is detective work, there is no detective; although there are twists and turns, there is rarely any artificial ratcheting up of suspense. Instead, Harris trusts to the rhythm of the republic's politics to generate his trademark readability, a rhythm that the Romans themselves enshrined in their literature as something relentlessly exciting: in short, a thriller. Genres ancient and modern have rarely been so skilfully synthesised.
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Such was the state of affairs on the ninth day, when we brought Annius and Numitorius into court. If anything, the crowd in the Forum was bigger than ever, for there were now only two days left until Pompey's great games. Verres came late and obviously drunk. He stumbled as he climbed the steps of the temple up to the tribunal, and Hortensius had to steady him as the crowd roared with laughter. As he passed Cicero's place, he flashed him a shattered, red-eyed look of fear and rage -- the hunted, cornered look of an animal: the Boar at bay. Cicero got straight down to business and called as his first witness Annius, who described how he had been inspecting a cargo down at the harbor in Syracuse one morning when a friend had come running to tell him that their business associate, Herennius, was in chains in the forum and pleading for his life. If you want to explore the remains of that city, there is no better guide than this. Claridge knows the modern city and its most recent archaeology better than anyone writing in English. Her book is a lucid and compact guide to the most ruinous and built-over monuments. I carry it with me everywhere when in the city (and have worn out a couple of copies). Clearly," said Cicero, turning to the jury, "he had not paid Verres and his gang of thieves a large enough bribe." Hannibal's Children (2002) and its sequel The Seven Hills by John Maddox Roberts. A victorious Hannibal sends all the Romans into exile, but they found a new city and their descendants return for vengeance. Cicero hurried through to find two formidable men of middle age -- "the perfect witnesses from my point of view," as Cicero afterwards described them, "prosperous, respectable, sober, and above all -- not Sicilian." As Lucius had predicted, they were reluctant to get involved. They were businessmen, with no desire to make powerful enemies, and did not relish the prospect of taking starring roles in Cicero's great anti-aristocratic production in the Roman Forum. But he wore them down, for they were not fools, either, and could see that in the ledger of profit and loss, they stood to gain most by aligning themselves with the side that was winning. "Do you remember what Pompey said to Sulla, when the old man tried to deny him a triumph on his twenty-sixth birthday?" asked Cicero. "He told me over dinner the other night: 'More people worship a rising than a setting sun.'" This potent combination of name-dropping and appeals to patriotism and self-interest at last brought them around, and by the time they went in to dinner with Cicero and his family they had pledged their support.
Like I Claudius, a novel that similarly exploited the resources of classical literature, Imperium takes the form of a memoir. Tiro, the shy and bookish slave who writes it, was celebrated in ancient times as the inventor of shorthand: Harris has him transcribing key conversations and speeches with a flawless accuracy, and even, on one occasion, when he is secreted into a conference, serving as a human bug. But that is not the limit of Tiro's value as a literary device, for he was also the slave of the most prolific author in ancient history, the Roman who more than any other reveals himself to us in all his manifold contradictions, his brilliance and his blindness, his ambition and his vulnerability: Marcus Tullius Cicero.
It's told first-person by Tiro, Cicero's scribe, who's a real guy who wrote a real biography of Cicero (now lost). It's a clever gambit by Harris; it allows him, among other things, to slyly inform you when the passage you've just read is the actual transcript of Cicero's speech, which happens often. He just has Tiro say something like, "And I am certain that the above speech is exactly as he told it, because I wrote it down myself and the record still survives." That sentence is exactly true. The Caius Trilogy by German author Henry Winterfeld: Caius ist ein Dummkopf (Caius is an Idiot); Caius geht ein Licht auf (Caius has an Inspiration), and Caius in der Klemme (Caius in a Fix). The first part was published in English with the alternate title Detectives in Togas. The second was published in English with the alternate title Mystery of the Roman Ransom. An Echo in the Darkness (1995) by Francine Rivers; the continuing story of Hadassah and Marcus. Mark of the Lion Trilogy book 2
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